Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Quotes about:

• Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, Games, People

  "'The Buddah' & the End of Human Suffering/Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  12 Copy quote

• If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place among nations. Those countries are neglected and left to fend for themselves.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Important, Neglected

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  13 Copy quote

• Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Suffering, Made, Humans

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

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• The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last.

  Pankaj Mishra

  New York, Long, Lasts

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Mean, Self, World

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

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• The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth - that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans - is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots - the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Disappointment, Revenge, Growth

  8 Copy quote

• When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Past, India, Littles

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

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• You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Able, Violence, Greedy

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  4 Copy quote

• Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Freedom Of Speech, Guarantees, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as being negative or harmful before they become a part of your being, before they become some kind of action like writing an angry letter to someone or speaking too strongly to someone.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Ideas, Negative

  Source: www.believermag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." Buddhism does not prescribe rituals or prohibitions in the way many religions do.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Buddhism, Doe, Needs

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  6 Copy quote

• In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, America, Important

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Ideas, Sometimes, Consciousness

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Vanity, Feelings

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Responsibility, Thinking, Novelists

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Morning, Believe, Buddhism

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Meaningful, Ideas, Democracy

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

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• I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Crush, Successful, Careers

  Interview with The Believer Magazine, staging.believermag.com. March, 2007.

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• As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Communication, Home, Voice

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Holiday, Years, Two

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  12 Copy quote

• The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, People

  Interview with The Believer, staging.believermag.com. March, 2007.

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• In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they barely knew before they were married. In America there's this idea that "how could someone get married without being deeply in love with each other?" but in a lot of these cases feelings of love and affection actually grow after they've been legally and formally brought together.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Ideas, America, Wife

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic department - and even many literary writers look and behave like young urban professionals and canny careerists.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, Media, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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